The Mead plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
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Mead’s center stands about 770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 660 ft to 830 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dexter Member of Woodbine Formation (sandstone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale, marlstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Mead reaches the Gulf of America by way of Double Spring Branch, Rock Creek, the Washita, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 830 river miles.
680 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mead; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
